SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I Pivoted From Flat and Unhappy to $6m and High Growth
08 Nov 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey folks, hope your Q3 and Q4 is off to a good start. We just wrapped up Founder 500 in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of bootstrap founders showed up. It was an amazing time. I loved meeting so many of you.
This interview today is a recording from that session, which you're gonna love because now we have visuals, we have the founder teaching, and I made every single speaker include their revenue graphs and real artifacts in their presentations. Without further ado, let's jump in.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool.
Chapter 2: What inspired the host's journey from unhappiness to success?
It's like a big Excel sheet for all these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com.
Please help me in welcoming Chris Brisson from Sales Message to the Stage.
Chris, come on. Hello, everybody. I hope everyone is doing awesome. Actually, a fun fact. So I met Nathan, this is probably 2012, 2013, at InfusionCon. And he walks up to me and he says... you know, in typical Nathan fashion. Hey, man, what's your revenue? How much are you doing? Well, I'm freaking out going, who is this guy? I don't know who he is. He's asking all these awkward questions.
And so this is, you know, eight, whatever, 10 years later, he's still asking these hard questions. So appreciate it, Nathan. Thank you for having me. Looking forward to it. So my name is Chris Bersan. I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called Sales Message.
And in this talk, I'm going to tell you sort of the journey, the story, some of the stuff that's working well for us, some tactical, but more of the entrepreneur journey, which I think we've all gone through. So I'm going to talk about how I pivoted from flat and unhappy to 6 million and high growth, all completely bootstrapped. And here I have no hair, but now I have hair. So... Anyhow.
All right. So over the next 20 minutes, I'm going to talk about really sort of three things here. One is the pivot. And if you've been an entrepreneur, you've probably created a company and you realize maybe it's something that you didn't really like. And I want to talk to you about this company that actually still exists today. It's called Call Loop.
Talk about that journey and realize that, wow, this horse is not the horse that I want to bet on for my ultimate future. And that journey, how I lost a year and a half of time, 150 grand working on a product no one wanted. Maybe you've done that. And really the one question that really changed everything. Then we're going to talk about the product vision, really dive into sales message.
Our vivid product vision, how we can paint your future, how we've done that, what I call the platform game, how we can quantify product market fit, and really the vision for the overall product. Ship early, ship often, how MTP can be like the unlock to really grow your business. And then I'll talk to some keys to scale and keys to success. One thing I call stack the line.
And this is how you create a multi-pronged SaaS company. not just one product, but multiple products that can continue to sort of allow a lot of expansion revenue, people, and then we'll talk about some pricing. So, let's get into it. And actually, Nathan, I think these might be the old slides. Either way, we'll dive into it.
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Chapter 3: How did the guest pivot their business and what lessons were learned?
And the webinar turned into $3,100 in sales, more money than we made in a whole year and a half trying to sell this other product that we spent a lot of money with. So this is where the idea of sales message came from was like, oh, okay, well, let me put it together. I don't touch it because I don't want to waste any time or money and we pre-sold it, right? So today, here's where we're at.
So we did 36,000, 360, one, two. We'll probably hit between seven and eight. You know, this is sort of our trajectory right now. But we're on this really, really fast growth path. And it's all been bootstrapped. We didn't raise any money. And in fact, I just started taking a salary. I didn't need to. Call loop still runs, actually. And so I want to talk to you guys about the Vivid product vision.
And so... Cameron Harold, I read this book years ago, I met Cameron years ago, and he was actually the impetus for me writing this whole blog series. He actually was using it, and he's like, call loop sucks. And that was like, oh my god. Because he was speaking, and it wasn't working, and all this sort of stuff. And so he was actually responsible for really helping me pave this new path.
But his book, The Vivid Vision, what it talks about is if you were to look at three, five years in the future, what does it look like? And to go through that exercise to really understand what do I want to create, one for myself, for a new company, but also what does your product look like?
And so one of the things for us is, you know, if you've read Jim Collins, you know, he talks about the BHAG, the Big Hairy Audacious Goal. And so our big vision, which is, you know, three, five years down the future, it's this. Sales Message is the leading global all-in-one omni-channel messaging platform for sales marketing support teams. Cool.
We are not there, but we at least know where we're going. And so we can start to quantify this vision. So global, what does it look like? Well, we want to be in these countries, right? What does Omni channel look like? Well, we want to be in these channels, right? What does it look like for a sales team?
And so we can start to really move into this larger vision that the hard part is your team doesn't know where you're going. And so how do you sort of tell the story about, Hey guys, this is where we're going. This is what it looks like. Here's how we get there exactly. And so a big vision, you know, you sort of track that back and then you can quantify quarter over quarter.
How are we moving towards this big goal?
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of product vision in business growth?
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So the one thing that we did and I would encourage you to as well as look at what's a model in the marketplace that you can model. So HubSpot for us is our model. What HubSpot did very well is they sort of took the approach of we have sales, you have marketing, you have customer support, you have operations. And through that, you have SMB, you have mid-market, you have enterprise.
And so what they built is essentially their sort of flywheel version of that. And so, hey, we're gonna go on the marketing hub, we're gonna go on Starter. Starter is SMB, what do they need From a product perspective, what do we need to create to drive that traffic? What do we need from a sales process? So all these quadrants expand into the entire organization.
And so we can start to model like, hey, we're going to go deep on the marketing hub. We're great in SMB. Let's move into mid-market. And then over time, we can build out to enterprise. But you have to have product market fit to then get to go-to market fit to then get to growth and moat and scale. And so we're not going to go to enterprise because we can't win deals. Why?
We don't have SOC 2 and all these other things that they require to even be in part of the deal. So what we call is the platform game. This is a very basic version of it. But what we do is go, hey, what's our vision for the future? What products do we need to create? And then from a high level, how can we work backwards and really get to a line item of here is exactly what we're going to build.
So the team can start to play a game. How do we play a game of success? So what we did is we just mapped it out. And we said, hey, here's these features. And we just color coded it. Now these all link over to a further document of something I'll get into of MTP and whatnot. But grays, we haven't done it yet. Yellow is a Pareto principle of 80% complete. So we call MTP table stakes in advanced.
This is our quantification of how we reach this tipping point of, are we ready for go-to-market? Sure, you can build a product in a feature set, but you may not be ready to market it and get customers because they go, oh, do you have that? No. Do you have that? No. Okay, well, we'll go with somebody else. So you want to get some more yeses. We'll talk a little bit about that.
So we just quantify this. Again, this is as a team, when you show your whole team, we're at 40 some odd people right now. Guys, where are we at and what can we quantify quarter over quarter and start to knock this down? Hey, you know what? Let's go a little bit deeper on calling. What else can we do? Well, we've got a whole list of ideas and product feature set that we can build.
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